The Divergence of Legal Procedures

Simeon Djankov et al. (2003) introduce a measure of the quality of contract enforcement -- the formalism of civil procedure -- for 109 countries as of 2000. For 40 of these countries, we compute procedural formalism every year since 1950. We find that large differences in procedural formalism between common and civil law countries existed in 1950 and widened by 2000. For this area of law, the findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that national legal systems are converging, and support the view that legal origins exert long lasting influence on legal rules.